Messages

586

December Madness I: 2012 / December Madness!

« on: Nov 25, 2012, 01:05 am »

We're coming up on the 13th anniversary of SMNetwork, and next year will be the TENTH anniversary of the forums! (Crazy, no?) So I thought we should have a little fun and decide once and for all what the ultimate stage manager's symbol should be. Being your typical unathletic theatre nerd, I've always felt left out of sports excitement, so starting December 1, 2012 we will be taking on this challenge... tournament style.

That's right, it's the office supply/power tool championships. Gadget thunderdome.

Much like with sports seasons, I've come up with a loosely seeded tournament order and arbitrary "divisions" based on levels of stage management experience. I have attached the starting lineup and a bracket form to this post for anyone who is inclined to gamble on such things or wants to play fantasy football with the tools included. Pick your favorite and root for it as if it were your home team. It will make things far more interesting. Feel free to campaign for your favorite items, extol their virtues, and trash talk the other stuff. *evil grin*

Matches will be decided by poll. Four polls will run simultaneously for the first two rounds, each round lasting approximately half a week. This means we should be finished in early January. Give your relatives another reason to look at you strangely - stop by and cheer for your favorite all through the holiday season!

EDIT: Bracket updated with latest results 8 Dec 2012.

587

Employment / Dear Abby: How do you say "stop"?

« on: Nov 23, 2012, 12:42 am »

From time to time the SMNetwork staff will receive request from members to post questions on their behalf, in order to preserve their anonymity. This is one of those questions.

So, I have this friend who I have known off and on for years, and he is a pretty bad stage manager.  I know mostly second hand, I have worked for the same theaters and same directors as he has worked with.  He is currently working with two close technician cohorts of mine.

He is not a leader.

He constantly blames other people for problems that are his – in fact in the years I have known him, he has never (in his eyes) made a mistake. 

He is often paranoid – spending hours and hours over the past years complaining how people at so-an-so theater are out to get him. 

In general he is very frustrated about the downward spiral of his career.

Combine this with an attitude that he is “God’s gift to stage management” – it’s just a perfect storm for him being miserable, which he is.  He is currently on tour, and reports from other people on the tour – he is very close to being fired.  (I know this inside information but he does not. They asked me about my availability after the first of the year. Awkward, huh?)

Recently, he has talked about leaving the field, and I am torn. Part of me wants to support him in his dream, I mean we are friends.  But part of me knows he was NEVER meant to be a stage manager and I think it’s time for him to step aside.   He is talking about other jobs in theater, which I think he might find some success in, although I think theater is not going to be his friend.  I am worried about he will continue to pine for stage management after leaving it.  He is applying to grad school, because he wants to teach stage management. (I am also worried about. He is perhaps the most negative person when we talk about the career and the business. I fear how he would teach and how he would mold the next generation of stage managers.)

How do you have a honest conversation about this as a friend? Do I continue to just stay silent about this? Thoughts?

(BTW, I have said "no" to being available for the tour, as I don’t think it would be cool to take a job from a friend.)

588

The Green Room / Re: Shall there be an SMNetwork LinkedIn Group?

« on: Nov 21, 2012, 03:29 am »

So yes, the general consensus seems to be "meh." Let's hold off for now. Perhaps we can revisit at a later date.

589

The Green Room / Re: DISCUSSION: Edward Marston's THE QUEEN'S HEAD

« on: Nov 19, 2012, 10:37 pm »

*bump* Summer tends to snarl everyone up. Maybe with Thanksgiving this week some of you may have time to finish up the book?

590

The Green Room / Re: SMs as depicted on stage & in the movies

« on: Nov 19, 2012, 03:14 pm »

That reminds me, did anything ever come of that book club for the Nicholas Bracewell novels?

591

Students and Novice Stage Managers / Re: Production Stage Manager Versus Stage Manager

« on: Nov 18, 2012, 08:30 pm »

I reached over to Wikipedia to back up my claim here, and found my own preference is pretty much accurate for US terminology. To my mind, PSM implies that you were supervising other stage managers. "Stage manager" can imply that you were the only one on the gig, or that you were a secondary SM without supervisory responsibilities on a gig with a large team.

If I saw "PSM" on a resume I'd expect you would have experience heading an SM team, generating master calendars, running production meetings, overseeing a full season, and possibly with some hire/fire discretion for subordinate SMs. IMHO if you haven't done these things, stick with just "stage manager."

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stage_management#Regional_differences

592

Students and Novice Stage Managers / Re: Production Stage Manager Versus Stage Manager

« on: Nov 18, 2012, 07:13 pm »

What was the title specified in the show's playbill for your work?

593

Employment / Re: Websites

« on: Nov 18, 2012, 02:53 am »

Josh, here's what I noticed at first glance.

1. Professional is misspelled in your header.
2. Wondering why you would choose a domain name that will make people think of Mitt Romney (I know you're thinking J.P.R. Omni, but I saw JP Romni.)
3. By listing your resume as a "theatre index" you are losing all of the search engine traffic for people who will be looking for "Josh Parkin-Ring Resume."
4. Missing an "r" at the end of "Production Stage Manager" on your first item in the "Theatre Index."
5. You have an infinite canvas. I am confused as to why you are using a playbill "I only have 500 letters" bio when you could actually use that canvas to tell us about who you are as a person.
6. Katonga - add a line break between "katonga montage" and the first video.
7. Also Katonga - I would change the font color in the dark grey bars to white. It's almost illegible in the grey-on-grey you have going on right now. Also, in a couple of those headers you've got black text while in the rest you have grey. Be consistent. Same goes for "She Loves Me."
8. The site is loading really slowly for me. I parsed the individual components of the page and it looks like you're on a very slow server. Once I got a good connection to your host the rest of the page components downloaded fine, but FireBug is showing me that it's taking anywhere from 1 to 743ms for GoDaddy to even start sending page data to your visitors. You can help this somewhat by reducing the size of your images. I pulled down that big 600x608 graphic you've got up for "The Understudy" and ran it through Irfanview's "Save for Web" plugin - reduced the size from 625.43k to 69.3k without losing any noticeable image fidelity.

Hope this helps.

594

Employment / Re: Websites

« on: Nov 13, 2012, 08:38 pm »

My thoughts on Cedes' site... good start... needs some fine tuning.

• Move all of your pages up a directory so your sublinks aren't going to domain/domain/page, but instead to domain/page.
• Compress your background images. It shouldn't take 5 seconds to load your background.
• Copyedit your intro on the welcome page. (See below)
• On the welcome page move the "www.mercedescoley.com" to the top, center, above the navigation, I think.
• On the Links page fix the spacing between the lines.
• On the Links page re-word your bullet points so they are consistent. "Link to, Link to, Link to my, Link to..."  - personally I think the "link to" is redundant, considering it's a links page.
• On the links page, fix where you open and close your "a" tags. It's inconsistent. For the top three links you've activated the whole line, but on the fourth item you've only linked the word "LinkedIn."
• On your welcome page, you can get rid of the footer div, it's adding unnecessary length to the page, forcing the browser to scroll even though there's no text left.
• On the About Me page, add a blank line in the right hand column between the text & photos.
• You use a lot of apostrophes. This is a real niggly thing, but I cannot stand how Trebuchet kerns its apostrophes. Try Verdana instead.
• About me page, right hand column - don't force the line breaks with <br>. Fonts will render differently on different screens and make for wonky line breaks.
• About me page, resize the images in the right column so they're the same width.

RE the copyediting:

"Welcome to my professional website." (as opposed to a casual one?)
"... as both a person and a stage manager." (I thought this was your professional site? Why are we reading about who you are as a person?)
3rd sentence - you can chop half the words. Make it a call to action. "Contact me with any questions."
2nd Para, 1st sentence, "its" not "it's."
3rd para - space between Desdemona and the left parenthesis that follows.
Per Wikipedia, it's Ann-Marie MacDonald, not Anne Marie. (lose the E, add a hyphen.)

595

The Green Room / Re: Catchphrases

« on: Nov 07, 2012, 04:22 pm »

"Live theatre, ladies & gents."

596

The Green Room / Re: Inside the SM Office

« on: Nov 06, 2012, 05:19 pm »

1. What is your favorite word?
Kerfuffle.

2. What is your least favorite word?
"Hack" - it's a lazy and misunderstood generalization

3. What turns you on?
Curiosity & laughter.

4. What turns you off?
Apathy.

5. What sound do you love?
I like silence most of all.

6. What sound do you hate?
I have soft sound sensitivity so there's many of them. Running water and chewing both make me violently angry.

7. What is your favorite curse word?
I'm fond of ****. Close seconds are **** and ********.

8. What profession other than yours would you like to attempt?
I make a point to try every career that sounds even remotely interesting, but there's a few that I can't do without advanced education. So, one of those - nuclear physics, advanced statistical analysis, engineering, archaeology.

9. What profession would you not like to do?
Anything involving children.

10. If heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the pearly gates?
Oops, sorry about that, clerical error. We're sending you back to where you came from.

597

Tools of the Trade / Re: Ladies and Gentleman.... the convertable laptop!

« on: Nov 03, 2012, 09:10 pm »

I've been working with Windows 8 since the very earliest versions as tech support is one of my main lines of income. I'll have to support it and train people how to use it, just as I currently do with Win XP, Vista and 7, Mac OSX, Android, iOS and 3 flavors of Linux.

I would not Win 8 for my own use, not even after the standard "wait until the first Service Pack" healing period. The "desktop version" seems so broken that it may be deliberate to forces users to adopt Metro. The Metro "tiles" for someone like me will mean scrolling forever to get to the ones I need - I currently have 30 shortcut directories and 80 individual shortcuts on my desktop, not to mention 20 pinned apps on the taskbar and another 25 pinned to the start menu. I have no room for gadgets or widgets on my desktop. The selection of available apps has been the Achilles Heel for Windows Phone OS and it hasn't improved despite devs having nearly two years to create apps for Metro.

The reviews I've seen of the convertible tablet/PC hardware and assorted hybrids is that they generally do neither task well. That they have major weak points at the hinges, as all of the info has to flow through one or two points of heavily-used failure. Not to mention that they're locked down so you can't install any other operating systems on them, shutting out the entire Linux community. As is the case with most emergent technology, I'm hedging my bets until it's been on the market and established as viable for at least 5 years before buying in.

598

The Green Room / Re: Hell in a Handbag (A Game for Stage Managers)

« on: Nov 03, 2012, 01:14 am »

What's our overhead clearance? Enough for rain pipes? Do we have somewhere that can hold the weight of the water tank? How much rain are we talking about? Do we have at least four spare line sets over  the outdoor area for a rain bar and snow cradle? Will we be able to keep enough space between the rain bar and the snow cradle to keep the snow from getting soaked every night? How much snow are we talking about? Is there any "outdoor" staging that would require actors, costumes or props to get wet? Will we need to switch from lavs to belt packs so that we aren't amplifying the sound of rain on the deck?

New note: After December 19, Dolly Parton will be replaced by Shania Twain as Blanche in "Streetcar!: The Musical." 

(Oh, and if you're joining us from TMZ.com, I'm joking. JOKING. Ha ha funny.)

599

The Green Room / Re: News: Canadian Theatre Festivals At A Loss

« on: Nov 03, 2012, 01:04 am »

And oddly enough, hot on the heels of this post, the Stratford festival announced that they were dropping "Shakespeare" from their name. Huffpo has the article.

600

Self-Promotion / Re: Operation Porchlight

« on: Nov 01, 2012, 01:04 am »

The event was a definite success. 4 empty houses and 9 volunteers saw a collective 400 kids and went through 12 pounds of candy. We wound up not getting foreclosed homes, but we did line up homes that were empty and on the market for sale. One of the sellers was so enthusiastic that he donated 4 pounds of candy to the cause. A local developer who worked with us is in the process of flipping close to 50 homes throughout Chicago and may want our help next year. Every volunteer said they'd definitely do it again next year.

We were covered by the RedEye, a tabloid spinoff of the Chicago Tribune, and promoted by the local police to thousands of readers on their mailing list. We got the endorsement of our local alderman and were used as a training exercise for a North Park University journalism class. 

All with a 16 day lead.

As the campaign coordinator for the project's first year, I can definitely say that my stage management experience played a huge role in getting the whole thing assembled. Lining up the venues, assembling the welcome packets and checklists for the volunteers, presetting and striking the house setups, determining what would be necessary for an outdoor event at sunset, communicating progress to the community leaders - it all felt very familiar.

The IT techniques that I used to get the word out over the past 16 days I largely learned from working on this site. So thank you guys.

If you're interested in doing something similar in your neighborhood next Halloween let me know!